What we had to do was to prevent, if we could, the Tirpitz school from getting its way, and we tried this not without some measure of success.  Even to-day our pacifists now join with chauvinist critics of a policy which was pursued steadily for many years, and was that of Campbell-Bannerman as well as of Asquith.  They reproach us for having entered on our path without having adequately increased our naval and military resources.  The reproach is not a just one.  It is founded on a complete misconception of the true military situation.  It is only necessary to read carefully through Admiral von Tirpitz’s very instructive volume to see that he took precisely the same view as we did, and as was held to unswervingly by our Committee of Imperial Defense.  England’s might lay in final analysis in her sea power.  She needed also a small but very perfect army, capable of high rapidity in concentration by the side of the great French Army, in order to prevent the coasts of France close to our own from being occupied by an enemy invading French territory.

In his book the Admiral refers to a letter I wrote to The Times on December 16, 1918, pointing this out and the grounds on which the strategical conception was based.  The Admiral expresses his agreement, and says that it was a fatal blunder of the German Highest Command not to use their submarine power at the very outbreak of the war to prevent our Expeditionary Force from crossing the Channel and co-operating in resisting the German advance towards Calais.  From there Germany could have commanded the Channel and bombarded London.

So he says, and we were quite aware all along that he might well think so.  The other thing that he makes plain by implication is that the direct invasion of England was never contemplated by Germany in the face of our command of the sea.  I had long ago satisfied myself that this was the German view, by a study of their military textbooks and from conversations with high German officers.  But, what was more important than what I personally thought, the Committee of Imperial Defense, on which I sat regularly during eight years, was clear about it, and this after close study, and after hearing what the most eminent exponents in this country of a different view had to urge before them.

Consequently our military policy was not doubtful.  No doubt it would have been a nice thing could we have possessed in 1914 a great army fashioned and trained, not for firing rifles on the seashore, but for a struggle on French and Belgian soil.  But such an army would have taken two generations at least to raise and train in peace time, and if we had laid out our money on it after 1870 instead of on ships, we should not have had the sea power which Tirpitz says gave us “bulldog” strength.  In strategy and in military organization you can not successfully bestride two horses at once.  He who would accomplish anything has to limit himself.  Possibly it was because this was not clearly kept in view even in Germany that the volume before us is an exposition of a thesis which is novel in these islands, that it was not England that was unprepared, but Germany herself.  For the confusion of objectives that led to this Tirpitz blames Bethmann’s peace policy, the parsimony of the Reichstag, and the Emperor’s failure to attain to clear notions about war aims.